1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for evaluating the quality of compressed video and image data and, in particular, to a method and system for estimating the objective quality of pictures, namely the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without referring to the source video or image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is the ultimate goal of the video experts to provide most perceptually appealing video images to viewers. One way to determine whether the resulting image quality is good or poor is to ask a panel of viewers to watch certain video sequences to provide their opinions. Another way to analyze video sequences is to provide an automated mechanism to evaluate the excellence or the degradation of the video quality. This type of procedure is known as “objective video quality assessment.”
A common approach to measuring the picture quality of a compression process is to make a comparison between the processed image and the unprocessed source images (hereinafter referred to as “double-ended measurement”). Various metrics are used, i.e., Block Artifact Metric (BAM), PSNR, Perceptually Weighted PSNR, etc., to evaluate an objective picture-quality measure. In particular, the PSNR is the most commonly used parameter for measuring any picture quality, especially in evaluating an MPEG-2 video bitstream. However, the double-ended measurement has some drawbacks in that access to both the processed picture and the source picture is not feasible if the source data or the alignment between the source and processed pictures is unavailable. In order to overcome this problem, a “single-ended measurement” has been proposed to monitor the video quality when the source is neither available nor controllable. Unlike the double-ended measurement, the single-ended measurement technique operates on the compressed picture without access to the source picture when evaluating video quality.
Many user-end applications require an estimate of coded video or image (herein referred to as pictures) quality. For instance, the user-end might need to enhance or post-process the pictures. In such a scenario, a measure of quality is essential in the control loop. Accordingly, the present invention proposes an improved objective quality assessment using the PSNR metric to evaluate the objective quality of compressed pictures without utilizing the source data.